Luke Rolfes: Poet Kimberly Ann Priest is out with a new collection of poetry from Texas Review Press called tether & lung. Priest explores motherhood, pain, compatibility, and the lifecycle of nature in these poems that rotate between pitch-perfect narratives and deeply metaphorical ruminations on life and existence. Thanks for taking some time with us, Kimberly! We’ve been fans of your work for a while. Can you tell us a little bit about tether & lung. How long have you been working on this project? What was the genesis of this book?
KAP: Sadly, the genesis for this book was divorce and a deep need to work through a lot of grief. The poems in this book were written alongside the poems in my first book, Slaughter the One Bird. Both books grew out of the two years I spent in an MFA program, and they gathered momentum and more poems until it was clear I had two distinct collections covering different emotional terrain. Collectively, I wrote the poems for these two books over three or four years. Slaughter, a more intense book of poems covering some of the violences I’ve experienced in my lifetime, was quickly obtained by Sundress Publications. It’s taken longer to curate the manuscript for tether & lung, and then find it a publication home. I could not be happier with where it has landed.
LR: What about the final stages of editing? Were there “tough cuts” to make? Any “last minute additions” to round things out? Or did the book come together quite easily?
KAP: My first rendition of tether & lung was more pastoral and lacked the urgency of this final collection. Over time, I cut some of the pastoral and reworked other pieces to create more tension. Then I wrote new poems to fill out the narrative of the book. Nothing was last minute. The book was finished—and I knew it was finished—a couple of years before it found a home. I wouldn’t say it came together easy or hard. But I will say that writing and finding homes for individual poems has always been easier for me than completing a manuscript. Being a narrative poet (for the most part) it’s difficult to strike balances between narrative, metaphor, form, and feeling. I want a book to read like a well composed piece of music with each note in tune with all others and resonate at exactly the right moment. Only my readers can tell me if I succeed at this.
LR: The sections of this collection are broken as follows: “The Gelding,” “Her Hand,” “A Tether” and “Of Lungs.” What prompted you to organize this collection into these sections?
KAP: Honestly, Dennis Hinrichsen. We worked poems together for a few years before the pandemic and awhile during. Even now, I have him read some of my manuscripts for feedback. When I met Dennis, he had long been a published poet and I was just beginning. He made all the difference in my work at that time and really helped me understand how to form a manuscript. Before its final iteration, I had tether & lung divided into four parts. After he read the final draft, he suggested I give the parts subtitles and rattled off these four in an email. I loved it and took his advice.
LR: One more question on organization. You have a fascinating poem called “Not Human” that appears at the very end of your manuscript---after the acknowledgments and notes. I’m curious about this organizational strategy. Why did you choose to separate this one from the rest?
KAP: This decision has inspired some controversy! I’ve had some readers feel the book didn’t need this poem as a sort of addendum and others adore it. In the end, I really wanted this poem in the book, but it didn’t seem to fit in the four sections. In truth, the episode in the poem happened after divorce and after I had graduated with my MA. I was an adjunct at a small private college in Michigan where one of my students inspired this poem. In writing it, I was so aware that my husband’s internal experience as a closeted gay man and this student’s experience as a gay man were the same, or similar. Both had been bullied, felt alienated within certain social groups, and suffered undesirable labels within certain contexts. In class, as the poem relays, my student literally said that he was a plant because several religious groups had decided that he was “not human.” Thus, in the poem I, a heterosexual woman, also find cause to identify as a plant and empathize with my student as well as my ex-husband’s feelings of vulnerability. I placed it outside the narrative of the book as, what I would consider, a reflection or prayer of empathic identification with my ex-husband. The narrative of the book ends with traumatic rifting. Our domestic world was torn apart and that’s how the narrative needed to end. “Not Human” stands alone as a response to the book’s narrative.
LR: I’m curious: When you draft a poem, do you start with narrative memory? Or perhaps an image? I read your poems as being structurally narrative, yet they are interspersed with wonderful metaphor and symbolism throughout that is often grounded in natural images. Horses, eggs, flowers, etc. Can you tell us a little bit about your generative process?
KAP: I would love to! I tend to write within a certain set of images, and, via my imagination, I live in the world of those images for a season, that season lasting as long as it takes to complete a narrative. It’s both a conscious and an unconscious effort. On some level, I’m not sure why certain images capture my attention for a season. They just do. And those images are either rife with memories of a specific time in my life, or they become a filter through which I experience the present. It’s world-building that is as intentional as it is unintentional. As I was writing tether & lung, the images I called up from my world during my marriage were the ones that you mention. They are also very much a part of a rural central Michigan landscape of small farms. Specifically, our horses and chickens felt like companions to the drama of the experiences in the poems, as did other living things of that time and place. It was a landscape as tender as it was brutal—a way that I often see the wild natural world. We lived on a small farm surrounded by woods. Birth and death were cyclical and constant. You couldn’t escape the realities of either and you couldn’t pretend that one didn’t precede the next in a generational rotation. Having spent nearly all my existence among farms and forests, my imagination is deeply influenced by nature, its cycles and contradictions. Nature, to me, is less self-involved and more honest than the human world. It doesn’t hide or disguise its ugliness while also surprising us with its generosity and protectiveness. I think all of this shows up in this book.
LR: One of the things I love about your poetry, Kimberly, is your titles. The titles of the poems, often, do the heavy lifting of establishing a subtext. I’m thinking of titles like “After My Husband Tells Me He Is Gay, I Contemplate Suicide” and “Daughter as Still Life after Divorce [with Pear in Bowl in Kitchen].” What are your thoughts on titles? Are they a starting point for a writer? A finishing touch?
KAP: For me, they can be either. Sometimes I start with a title, sometimes I write a poem that needs a title. Sometimes I start with a title, write the poem, and then change the title. I don’t force myself to do poetry only one way. I write what I need to and find out what is happening. For most of the poems in which the title provides subtext (like the ones you mentioned), often the poem is written first and then I read and refine the poem, read and refine some more, asking the poem what it is doing. I will often ask aloud, “What are you trying to tell me?” Through this process, I realize what is happening or what the poem is trying to name. If I remember correctly, this is what happened with “After My Husband Tells Me He Is Gay, I Contemplate Suicide.” I wrote about the egg, its denaturization in the process of boiling, because I was thinking about eggs in this season of poems. I didn’t know what the poem was trying to name. And then it just came to me: it was trying to name my feeling of wanting to die after all the pain I had suffered with my ex and the divorce, the destabilization of discovery that the man I had been married to for fifteen years did not desire me as if the whole experience had been a very long slow dramatization of life, not living itself. And this false narrative had changed my own nature. It had altered my relationship with myself, my children, and my world so that I didn’t know who I was anymore.
However, the poem itself merely started with the egg. I was curious about what happens to an egg as it boils. I felt the need to write about it. Why? I don’t recall. Again, it was an image in my world at the time. And as I did my research, I came across this idea that the boiled egg can be tested by spinning it, meaning that you can find out if it is fully boiled by spinning it on the counter. Thus, the lines in the poem: “I pat it dry, then spin it on the countertop to see / if it is hard enough inside— / the more tender the insides the more unstable the spin.” I became fascinated by this and knew it was important. So, I wrote the poem and the lines, and these lines led me to the end of the poem: “… in fact, in its native state, / the egg would wobble so badly when spun / it might reel vicariously, / plunging its breakable body to the unforgivable surface / of the kitchen floor.” And with these lines, the egg was me. After divorce, I was so traumatized by the abuse in the marriage and the de-romanticization of the relationship, that I would curl up on my kitchen floor and shake—sometimes uncontrollably. I was in shock, real shock, and without much comfort in those early years. It’s a wonder I made it through. But this poem was also telling me that my shock and shaking were, in fact, evidence that my experiences had not hardened me. I was still tender inside and that’s why I was reeling. What a comforting thought for any traumatized soul: physiological evidence of trauma is a testimony to your tenderness. If that’s you, carry this knowledge with you as a balm.
So, to return to your question, the title was a finishing touch on this poem. In writing the egg, I was writing myself, and I discovered this in the process. The title simply named my experience, those early years, of feeling so denatured and unstable I wanted to die.
LR: You often write about pain---physical and/or emotional. A lot of young writers in my classes are interested in writing about pain. They ask about the “ifs,” “hows,” and “whens.” Writing pain can certainly be a way to process events, I’ve found. Certainly, at times, it can be cathartic. But how does a writer know when the writing is “for the self” versus when the writing is “for the outside world”? How does a writer decide what to share? I’d love to hear your thoughts on writing about pain.
KAP: These are great questions. They are important questions too, especially for young writers—though I do wonder if we become more self-conscious about writing pain as we age, as we get socialized out of it. Personally, I want to buck that trend, but, having written through so much of my personal pain already, I also find I now have less to write about.
Anyway, I will simply say with foolish confidence that pain does not obey any “ifs,” “hows” and “whens” so I’m not sure it makes sense to apply any such rules to writing about pain. We all experience pain, some more than others. I wish, with every breath I take, that I did not have so much pain to write about, that more of my existence had been joy and celebration, but it wasn’t. Ironically, the more I write through the pain, the more I recall past joys and celebrations however minor they may be. Additionally, a regular writing practice of writing through pain over the past decade has created, day by day, more space to experience joy and celebration in the present. But I’m not going to amplify the more ‘positive’ aspects of my life simply to make others comfortable. Likewise, I don’t write pain as a performance of suffering. The hard truth is, I’ve carried a lot of pain and my work as a poet has helped me divide up that load into digestible pieces that I could metabolize and expend and move on. Poetry literally kept me alive for several years. Without it, my fractured memories might have imploded my emotional life and buried me in grief.
So, I think the first step in writing pain is deciding what you need to write to survive. The goal is to care for your pain, comfort that pain. That pain is a part of yourself that is suffering and asking other parts of yourself to lean in and be with its discomfort. It’s not asking to be fixed or frozen in time. It seeks companionship. Start there, with companionship. Writing can help this part of yourself find language to name feeling, and when language and naming happens, you have an artifact outside the mind and body to view or hold and separate from the other parts of yourself. You are out there, separate from you and speaking. You can, in this dual personhood, serve as companion to the self. That’s what the poem allows. It is you separate from you. And there’s something about imagining this part of yourself as a whole person separate from yourself that becomes conciliatory. Forget audience and public performance. Just be with you in your pain at the moment the poem is sharing. If you go no further than this with your art, you have, nonetheless, done yourself a great service. Art has done you a great service. Poetry—the act of crafting the poem—has cared for you. You can stop there if you want.
Obviously, I didn’t want to stop there. I have been an artist since my youth and, in adulthood, made a conscious decision that I was going to make art out of my pain. In fact, I had to lament that pain was all the life material I had to mold and shape upon entering my MA and MFA, but I also decided that I was going to shape that pain into beautiful, sharable art objects. While the subject of my poems would be heavy and difficult, the form and language would be thoughtful, attractive, and speak to universal themes. In those early years, my writing often began as a cathartic exercise in which I wrote whatever came to mind without stopping to discover what I needed to name. Then I’d pick apart what I wrote and form some of these parts into episodes that, when further formed, became a metaphor for something larger, something universal. When the universal began to appear, I knew I was making art that could be shared with an audience. For me, pain becomes art when it takes on a formal quality and serves as a mirror for what others might be feeling or experiencing. If I’m going to bring my pain to community (as audience), it’s not enough for the poem to serve as personal catharsis. It must be well-crafted and become a space in which we can contemplate, reflect, empathize, celebrate, lament, feel together.
This is how I do poetry. This is how I work through and with my pain to make art that I can share. In sharing, my goal is to provoke my readers to think or feel. That’s it. I want them to sit with a feeling—probably an uncomfortable one—and I want them to contemplate, ponder, ruminate, evaluate, maybe learn something new. And I think pain is particularly wizening. We learn more from difficult emotions and experiences than we do the good and comfortable ones. We grow more through hardship. I wish it weren’t that way, but it’s mostly true. So, perhaps reading poetry of pain is also maturing.
If I could give any advice to young writers about writing pain, I would tell them to do only what they are ready for. Writing pain for self can be so freeing. Sharing that pain with others invites a variety of responses, and sometimes those responses are heavier than the pain itself. A lot of people in my present culture, American culture, cannot abide the presence of pain. We can be so allergic to suffering and push it to the margins of our society to keep it out of view, out of mind. And, for this reason, we also bury our own pain under false positivity and cheerful personas. This, of course, does not cure its manifestations which often show up as private destruction. Nonetheless, this is what we do. Not all of us, but many of us. If someone is going to write through pain and make art to share with others, it’s imperative that they count the cost. Admittedly, I was caught off guard by some of the reactions to my first book and I wish I’d been more ready to handle the comments including undesirable platitudes or encouragements to write happier poems. I wish someone had told me what to expect, so I’ll be that person. Don’t put your pain forward for an unknown audience to maw if you aren’t ready. I’m not saying this to discourage anyone from sharing your writing of pain. I’m saying, be ready before you do it. There are people that need to hear your stories because they will bear witness with your pain and feel comforted by your journey. And there are people who will hear your pain and try to change it. Be ready for both.
LR: Let’s look at a couple poems. I love the ending of “A Study of Opiates.” The speaker is changing her son for bed, and the poem ends with the line “how like a snake he appears, coiling into himself.” This image is immediately followed by “Into Another Country” which narrates the birth of a child from the mother’s perspective. She goes through the hell of delivery, and then the mother’s baby is immediately taken from her. There’s a rawness to your motherhood poems that I really like. Can you talk about these two pieces and why you chose to pair them so closely together at the end of this section?
KAP: These two poems speak to the exhaustion and urgency I felt as a mother in an abuse situation. Were it not for my children’s existence, I could have walked away from my marriage with little consequence. Because of them I had to stay and worry about the long-term effects of our domestic environment on their psyche. In “A Study of Opiates” I’m acknowledging the naturalness of self-centeredness at infancy, how we begin life fully dependent on others’ labor and focus our energies on soothing ourselves while making demands that others’ meet our needs. The whole book is sort of this inverted Eden and, in this poem, I’m watching my son as though he is the embodiment of temptation—a temptation to remain infant and demand others’ meet our needs. This is part of the nature of an abusive system where one party expects all other parties to adjust to an environment that is solely focused on meeting the demands of the one. “A Study of Opiates” uses my son as a metaphor for the one. He is the next generation of men in a cycle of social patriarchy, and I have always felt this concern for how he will or will not embody its values.
The next poem, “Into Another Country” was inspired by the border crisis between the US and Mexico in the early years of Trump’s presidency. There were stories in the news about individuals crossing the desert to enter our country illegally and I was ingesting the desperation of their cause. As a mother who has once wanted to gather her children and escape my husband’s tyranny, I understood why someone would risk their life to cross days of desert in deadly heat with a blind hope toward freedom. Many of the news stories were focusing on the cages by which individuals at the border were separated and locked up. Children were being taken from their parents. However, it was the article “Border crossers and the desert that claims them” by Daniel Gonzalez for USA Today that really inspired the poem. I reference it in the notes section of my book. “Into Another Country” ends with an exhausted mother who has just traversed the desert of giving birth. Her body is worn and as others in the hospital room take her infant from her, there’s nothing she can do to resist. Her body is exhausted. Likewise, families who have crossed the desert border only to have their children separated from them by border control are too exhausted to resist the rifting. Can you imagine striving and suffering that much for freedom with little ones in tow only to have them whisked away by armed strangers? This rifting at birth was the closest I could come in my personal experience to empathize—but one I felt deeply.
Together, the poems speak to the limitations that those with less power have in the realms of those with more power, and how it is those with less power that are ogled and more severely judged for their activities in the face of tyranny than the tyrants themselves. In fact, tyrants keep the cameras focused on the oppressed. In the context of my marriage and motherhood, I held all the tensions of my situation in my body and maintained a deafening silence to mitigate what my social circles might do if they understood the extent of my circumstances. They would not act wisely; I knew that. So, my focus was on how to raise this next generation—my son and daughter—amid these complexities, much of the time having to give into my weariness. “Exhaustion overcomes my power to resist and retain her,” the poem reads, “They have her. My body has me. She wails. I hear. They will return her, I believe, held against my will by sleep.”
In the end, all heroism is overcome by a need to sleep or self-soothe. Most of us cannot keep fighting to retain autonomy or dignity in the face of tyranny. We lie down in the desert. We coil into ourselves.
LR: I’m curious about the poem “Divorce.” If I read the text of the poem, it appears, more or less, as a love poem. Yet the title of the piece shifts my understanding of it completely. Can you go into more detail about this poem and the juxtaposition you’ve made?
KAP: Yes. I love this poem. And I love disrupting the notion that feelings of love and hate are mutually exclusive, that one cannot feel immense affection for someone who harms them, that divorce is always this celebratory division of two people who want nothing to do with each other anymore. I was devastated by the act of divorce. I didn’t want to do it. I DID want to be safe and live a freer existence. When my husband and I married we were best friends, and had I known beforehand that he was gay, I would have been his greatest advocate in our social circle. In fact, he knew this and said so. But I didn’t know, and there was so much I loved about him. After divorce, I poured that love into several poems, some that were scraped but written nonetheless to hold the emotions. When I wrote this one it had no title until it finally did. The end of the poem came to me as a surprise and, as I read it, I realize what the poem was saying to me: divorce had happened long before the act of divorcing. All the love and admiration I felt for this person were kept at a distance. I wasn’t allowed to admire or desire up close until night when he had fallen asleep. We were separate in spirit. Not only were our sexualities different, but his capacity to love someone was diminished by learned misogyny, family trauma, and a deep need to maintain control in the partnership. Divorce was the nature of our relationship.
Additionally, in the religious circle I grew up in, divorce was an undesirable, aggressive legal act of rifting that offended God and community. This poem argued, on my behalf, that the rifting was of the heart. It had nothing to do with the paperwork I presented after fifteen years of marriage. It was the condition of our marriage. He had always been divorced from me—my needs and desires—as is anyone who insists, in any relationship, that they are the superior being of the two. This poem means a lot to me. It was exonerating when I wrote it.
LR: The lovely “Self-Portrait [as Goldfinch in the Winter of Our Seventh Year]” shows us a speaker who likens herself to a goldfinch she sees out her window. Oftentimes, your poems (and the speakers of the poems) look to nature in an attempt to understand the self. There’s something important about the inevitability of nature that your poems seem to hold sacred. The order of nature maybe? Why do you think so many of your poems look to the natural world for understanding of the personal world?
KAP: To be honest, the human world has been profoundly unkind to me over the years, and I have looked to nature a lot for solace. I grew up in religious circles that valued men over women. My value as an artist or intellectual or anything else was greatly diminished as I was told that my value was in marrying or becoming a mother. And even in those roles, I was devalued and criticized. I also grew up in the lower class, so I didn’t have access to many opportunities or the resources to pursue a good education or a life as an artist. My existence was buried in menial work and abusive systems. Nature is the world I retreated to for comfort and understanding. I grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and escaped to water and trees any chance I could. I spent a lot of time alone. The living things of the natural world have always been better companions to me than the people I’ve had to live among. Their quest for survival has been more reflective of my own quest to survive than the questing of the people around me who have had the good fortune to spend their resources on their dreams and desires. I barely made it out of the first forty years of my life alive and I don’t think I would have without the companionship of nature. The goldfinch in the poem thrives despite scarcity. It takes the food from any source it can take it. It isn’t concerned with the nature of the giver or morality; it just takes food because it needs to eat to survive. I get this existence on a very visceral level, even as a metaphor for the emotional life that receives any morsel of assumed kindness or affection no matter how false, romanticizing that a word or action is intimate when it is nothing of the sort, just to keep from despairing. Nature eats, unapologetically, what is available because it is hungry, and sometimes it eats what will kill it because it has no other choice.
LR: Finally, what’s next for you and your work? Any new projects on the horizon?
KAP: I’ve written five books since tether & lung. Mostly, I’m trying to find good homes for these. I’m happy to report that one of them just one the 2024 Backwaters Press Prize for Poetry from Nebraska University Press! Wolves in Shells, embraces honest questions and vulnerability while telling the story of a woman navigating homelessness and memories as she attempts to leave a violent partner and takes its title from Gaston Bachelard’s quote “wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones.” It will debut in the fall of 2025. I have another book, Floralia, that will be out with Unsolicited Press alongside tether & lung. I’m really looking forward to this one since it is part of a press-wide campaign to promote and publish only women writers in 2025.
Otherwise, I’m doing research on ecocide, pin-up models, classic film, and rural poverty and slowly writing related poems about my childhood and pop culture during WWII. Nothing slows me down J.
LR: Thanks so much for taking the time to discuss your work with us, Kimberly!